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Download/1337/1337-2131-1-PB.Pdf A TARGET-ORIENTED APPROACH TO NEUTRALITY IN VOWEL HARMONY by Avery Ozburn B.Math, University of Waterloo, 2012 M.A., University of Toronto, 2014 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Linguistics) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) November 2019 © Avery Ozburn, 2019 The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: A target-oriented approach to neutrality in vowel harmony submitted by Avery Ozburn in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics Examining Committee: Gunnar Hansson Supervisor Douglas Pulleyblank Supervisory Committee Member Anne-Michelle Tessier Supervisory Committee Member Molly Babel University Examiner Patrick Moore University Examiner ii Abstract This dissertation provides a novel perspective on neutrality in vowel harmony, using evidence from multiple front/back and ATR harmony systems. While many standard accounts of harmony assume an equivalence between vowels that are neutral to harmony and those that lack a counterpart in the harmonic feature (e.g. van der Hulst 2016), this correspondence is demonstrably false in both directions. For example, in Hungarian (Chapter 3), [e:] lacks a harmonic counterpart, but is not consistently neutral to front/back harmony, in that it can alternate harmonically in some suffixes with [a:]. Conversely, in Mayak (Chapter 9), [a] has a contrastive ATR counterpart, yet is nonetheless neutral to ATR harmony. I argue that these types of patterns force a new, target-focused approach, where participation is based on the drive of specific vowel qualities to undergo harmony; neutrality results when this drive is insufficient to force unfaithfulness. This idea is motivated by cross- linguistic and phonetic facts suggesting that vowels that are low and/or rounded are inherently better targets of front/back harmony, while higher vowels are better targets of ATR-dominant harmony. I implement this approach formally in Harmonic Grammar; the harmony constraint is scaled by the quality of a vowel as a potential target, parallel to Kimper’s (2011) trigger strength scaling. This account can capture the complexities in the relationship between contrast and neutrality in a variety of harmony systems, including the gradience of neutrality (the height effect) in Hungarian (Hayes & Londe 2006), and paired neutral vowels in Mayak (Andersen 1999), among other cases. I argue that this view of harmony is necessary: neutrality is crucially about the quality of a vowel as a potential target of harmony, where target quality is determined in a cross-linguistically consistent, phonetically motivated way. iii Lay summary The goal of this dissertation is to establish and analyze the generalizations about which sounds can be exempt from a process called HARMONY, in which sounds within a word must match in some aspect of how they are pronounced. It is often the case that certain sounds, called NEUTRAL, are not subject to this requirement, and an ongoing question in linguistics is to determine which sounds are neutral and why. One of the most common generalizations made about neutral sounds is that they are those that lack a counterpart, produced in all the same ways except the aspect in which sounds must match for harmony. I discuss a number of languages in which this equivalence is false and provide a novel analysis, based on the relative drive for particular sounds to agree in particular properties. iv Preface A version of Chapter 3 has been published, as original, sole-authored work by me. Ozburn, Avery. 2019. A target-oriented approach to neutrality in vowel harmony: Evidence from Hungarian. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 47. 1–36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.681 A version of Chapter 5 has also been published, again as original, sole-authored work by me. Ozburn, Avery. 2019. A segment-specific metric for quantifying participation in harmony. In Katherine Hout, Anna Mai, Adam McCollum, Sharon Rose & Matthew Zaslansky (eds.), Supplemental Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Meeting on Phonology. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. A version of Chapter 7 is in press as a proceedings paper, again as original, sole-authored work by me. Ozburn, Avery. To appear. An analysis of ATR harmony in Alur. In Proceedings of the 2019 Canadian Linguistics Association Conference. All of the aforementioned chapters have been modified from their published form. The remainder of the dissertation is unpublished, original work by me. v Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay summary ................................................................................................................................ iv Preface ............................................................................................................................................ v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. x List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. xv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... xvi Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 1 Background ......................................................................................................................... 1 2 Central questions and main point ........................................................................................ 4 3 Formal proposal .................................................................................................................. 5 4 Typological predictions ...................................................................................................... 7 5 Structure .............................................................................................................................. 8 Chapter 2: Participation in front/back harmony ..................................................................... 12 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 12 2 General patterns ................................................................................................................ 14 2.1 Participation and neutrality ....................................................................................... 14 2.2 Other generalizations in front/back harmony ........................................................... 19 3 Harmony in the proto-language ........................................................................................ 22 4 Why we might want to rethink how participation gets defined ........................................ 24 5 Hypothesis based on the typology .................................................................................... 25 6 Structure of the rest of the section on front/back harmony ............................................... 26 Chapter 3: A target-oriented approach to neutrality in vowel harmony: Evidence from Hungarian .................................................................................................................................... 27 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 27 2 Hungarian harmony .......................................................................................................... 30 2.1 Vowel inventory and basic harmony pattern ............................................................ 30 2.2 Neutrality in roots ..................................................................................................... 33 2.3 Patterns of neutrality in suffixes ............................................................................... 37 2.4 Summary of patterns ................................................................................................. 42 3 Motivations for the asymmetries ...................................................................................... 44 4 Implications for views of neutrality .................................................................................. 46 4.1 The problem .............................................................................................................. 46 4.2 Problems for possible solutions within traditional frameworks ............................... 48 4.3 New view of neutrality .............................................................................................. 52 5 New theoretical approach: Target quality ......................................................................... 53 5.1 Harmonic Grammar (HG) ......................................................................................... 53 5.2 The nature of the harmony-driving constraint .........................................................
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